I have been in a relationship for an undisclosed amount of years. It began way before college and I am entering my senior year, so you do the math. The point is: my sloppy nights have never resulted in a stranger’s face in my bed the next morning. Lucky? Probably. Boring? Maybe to some people. Safe? Most def.

I have never dealt with a disease scare or the overall fright that comes with waking up in an unfamiliar location with someone you never remember meeting. That’s not to say that I haven’t had my share of embarrassing moments. Or mornings when I looked in the mirror and asked, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Only a recent graduate of the underage club, the majority of my nights out have consisted of shimmying up my skirt to woo a bouncer, or settling for a dive bar in the middle of nowhere. On this particular night, I believe it was a Tuesday – a night when I shouldn’t have been out in the first place since I had class the next morning -  the former had not worked out and so we ended up at the latter, which in this case was a very tiny, very sketchy, Mexican food place on the Lower East Side.

We had heard that they didn’t card, which they did not. I was so excited, I got my party on. Hardcore. Three pitchers of margaritas later, I am told by friends, I was rolling on the floor yelling obscenities…in an almost empty, dive restaurant….on a Tuesday night. If this isn’t the definition of pitiful, I don’t know what is.

But the worse was yet to come. All three of my friends puked on the way home. On a crowded subway. All over themselves and each other and me. Someone’s purse ended up a trashcan and one of us had to get our coat dry-cleaned the next day under the alibi that our “little brother” had the flu.

The next morning, I could only remember fragments of the night, which, luckily, prevented me from feeling much embarrassment. I would never see any of those people again, so what happened happened.

That is until I flipped on my laptop and signed into Facebook where I was attacked by 200 pictures of myself…. on the toilet.

What could have possibly ran through my mind at this point in the night is beyond me. “Oh, I am very drunk, and at a Mexican joint. Why don’t I go into the bathroom and have a photo shoot? Great!”

There was me on the toilet, skirt down around my knees. In the sink. On the ground (ew). Kissing the paper towel dispenser. My friends periodically came and went. There I was hugging one, biting the necklace of another (wtf?!), oh and there we are  in the mirror.

By the time I had awoken from my still drunken/pounding headache slumber, cleaned puke off the kitchen floor, and finally sat down at the computer, the album had had countless views, and comments- mostly jokes at my expense. No matter how quickly I untagged them, the damage had already been done.

Oh, and when I returned to the Mexican place a week later, they remembered me as the “bathroom girl” and asked me to leave. And I did, with my head hung in shame.

1. Check out a Concert

No, I’m not suggesting you sit on Ticketmaster for hours to pay hundreds of dollars to see Fall Out Boy. Check out a band you’ve never heard of. Scour the web for open mic nights and underground punk shows. You might end up catching the next big thing to hit MTV. If there’s a venue nearby that’s known for being a breeding ground for legendary rockers, join their mailing list. Otherwise, check out sites like Underground Hip Hop Dot Com or Open Mikes to find some decent music at a cheap price. Stuck on campus without a car? See if your school sponsors its own concert series, open mic’s or talent shows, and hit ‘em up, son.

2. Pee Your Pants (Not Literally)

Underground concerts too loud for you? Hit up a comedy club or try to catch an improv troupe in your area. Comedy shows run fairly cheap, and you can bust a gut without waking up with your ears ringing in the morning. Sites like The Improv list venues in several different cities, or you can Google “improv” and the name of your town to see if there’s anything nearby. Did you know that tons of Saturday Night Live regulars got their start at improv clubs like LA’s infamous Groundlings? Or that comic messiahs like Adam Sandler used to tour college campuses before making it big?

3. Take Center Stage

My personal life motto? You haven’t lived until you’ve Karaoke’d. Find a local dive bar that hosts karaoke, and hit it up. You don’t have to worry about being embarrassed in front of townies who are doing renditions of the Dixie Chicks and Metallica, and if you can force yourself onstage without boozing it up, you really won’t have to pay anything for a kick-ass good time. Karaoke in the states is at an all-time high, so there’s bound to be someplace nearby that will let you croon “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

4. Casino Night

Free drinks while you gamble? Two words for the poverty-stricken college student: Penny Slots.

5. Stage a Cultural Outing

Everyone wastes $10 at the cinemas these days to see 90 minutes of cliches and inevitable plot lines. Get your culture on and take in a play, a musical, a cabaret, a drag show, anything! If you live in a city that’s host to a variety of playhouses, chances are, you can get student rush tix on the cheap, and if not, check out your local repertory theaters or community theaters. There have been some amazing shows to hit the stages over the past few years, and chances are, you’ve only seen them on DVD (e.g. The Producers, Little Shop of Horrors, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hairspray… why not seem them all live?)

6. Laser Tag and Cosmic Bowling

Playing pseudo-sports in the dark, under black lights and glowing neon? It’s like a graffiti party, without the “Who the hell wrote that” factor the next morning! Let out your competitive streak by challenging your friends to a game or two, and follow up with a greasy trip to the 24-hour diner for some Disco Fries. Your arteries will hate you, but it’ll be a refreshing, welcome change.

7. Check Out Your Campus Calendar

Don’t feel like finding a DD or selling your soul for gas money? Tons of colleges these days are sponsoring quality entertainment on the weekends, in an effort to prevent their students from binge drinking for 72 hours straight. From music events to movie screenings to themed activities in the student union, you can get your fun on for cheap, or, even better, free, and you never have to worry about the cops busting up your good time.

It hurts enough to sever ties with someone who knew every intimate detail about you, but imagine those private moments, discussions and pictures becoming public knowledge at the hands of someone you loved.

Men.Style.com recently ran a story in its Details forum concerning the topic of revenge porn, defined by UrbanDictionary.com as “homemade porn uploaded by an ex-girlfriend or (usually) ex-boyfriend after particularly vicious breakup as a means of humiliating the ex.” While the writer, Richard Morgan, cautions against revenge porn lest anyone involved (usually the boyfriend) suffer legal consequences, the casual manner in which he describes revenge porn does not fully clarify just how damaging this growing trend can be.

An influx of lawsuits concerning variations of revenge porn (homemade sex tapes posted on internet porn forums, nude pictures uploaded to MySpace accounts, distribution of homemade DVD’s) has sparked interest and concern in law-makers, who feel that new laws should be established to regulate the final legal frontier: the Internet. Details questions the necessity of criminalizing revenge porn, ignoring the long reaching effects it could have on a victim and, therefore, trivializing the entire issue.

Revenge porn, argues Morgan, shouldn’t necessarily qualify as a crime because it simply serves as a sign of the times. It’s just the product of our self-obsessed, celebrity crazed, over-exposed and digitally adept generation: the 2008 equivalent of petty slander, right? Wrong. It is not, as the article put it, “the contemporary version of writing ‘Jenny gives good head’ on the bathroom wall.”

Chances are Jenny’s friends, family, boss, and professors are not going to happen upon the exact stall of the exact dive-bar where her drunk-ass ex managed to get his hands on some Jaeger and a Sharpie. That bathroom stall doesn’t say Jenny’s last name, and unless said ex has some scotch tape and a picture of her in his wallet, Jenny is faceless. Comparing scribbles above a urinal with the emotional damage, public embarrassment, and potentially career ruining effect of compromising someone’s online identity is completely inappropriate.

Revenge porn is just as–if not more– invasive, cruel and immoral as any other form of slander or libel and should be punished in exactly the same way. Of course the smartest way to avoid becoming a victim of revenge porn is to not do, make or say anything explicit with a partner, but that is slightly unrealistic, not to mention takes away a major perk of being in a relationship in the first place.

Having a partner who you know well, love and trust allows women to really open up and…let loose. Unfortunately, that blissful relationship doesn’t always last forever and sometimes there’s no telling what revenge will drive a person to do.

Think about this next time you pull out the digital camera in a moment of passion. Would you want your Facebook friends seein’ that?